From coquettish cooks to those who treat gastronomy as sport, why can’t
Nigella, Jamie and Mary treat us foodies to proper culinary TV?

The Great British Bake Off has become the Great British Cookery Show. The current series of the bread-and-cake-athon has enjoyed a peak audience of almost 5 million on BBC Two. That’s a million more viewers than the first episode of Gordon Ramsay’s mega-hyped Gordon Behind Bars (in which the superchef tries to teach prison inmates how to cook) got for Channel 4 – and Bake Off lured its audience without the massive advertising billboards or the big-name presenter.

It is far from the only cookery programme that’s raking in the viewers, though. Like amoebas, celebrity chefs somehow seem to keep reproducing. From former model Lorraine Pascale to Rachel Khoo in her Little Paris Kitchen, they are everywhere. And long-established stars like Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver still have plenty of pulling power, too. Lawson’s new series, Nigellissima (devoted to Italian food), is imminent; Oliver will launch 15-Minute Meals (the follow-up to his stupendously successful 30-Minute Meals) next month.

It’s easy to see why programme schedulers are so keen to fill our screens with food. Our appetite for celebrity chefs and food television is insatiable. Take the Hairy Bikers, whose series, Hairy Dieters, has just finished. They pulled in more than 2.5 million viewers, even when competing with the Olympics, and the book accompanying the series knocked the publishing phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey off the top of the best-sellers list.

But what are all these cookery programmes really about? Not eating, that’s for sure. They are gastronomic titillation; not so much look, don’t touch as look, don’t smell or taste. Their recipes are either unachievable or uninspiring, and I find it deeply depressing.

If I sound cynical, it’s because I spend my days concentrating on matters culinary. Happily, these include such simple concepts as smelling and tasting. It’s my job, as I heard myself telling my husband when he found me sampling from six different ice cream tubs one morning. But the lack of basic skill in much of our food TV doesn’t seem to matter to most people; it remains the escapism of choice for millions of us.

Just flick through the schedules for terrestrial TV alone, and you’ll find an astonishing array of food-themed shows. From the Take A Break school of programming, there’s the likes of Come Dine with Me (Channel 4). Unbelievably successful since its launch in 2005, this is car-crash cuisine, a lesson in how not to feed people, as the over-elaborate competes with the over-ambitious and the downright disgusting. But that’s the thing. Like Gordon Behind Bars, which showed precious little cooking, this isn’t about food at all. It’s a masterclass in bitchery and put-downs, delivered by celebrity-hungry competitors who are oblivious to how ridiculous the producers are making them look.

Then there’s MasterChef (BBC One), which comes in three flavours: regular, “The Professionals” and “Celebrity”, the latter being a word that is guaranteed to put me off my dinner. Great British Menu (BBC Two) – in which the nation’s top chefs compete to cook a four-course banquet for a VIP – is the programme that Britain’s chefs talk about among themselves, and few of them miss an episode. Stuck in the kitchen for much of the year, maybe it’s a way of catching up with their mates. But, as with MasterChef, viewers see plenty of pretty plate shots but very little else. This is gastronomy as sport, an opportunity to watch culinary athletes, not to learn about food or cooking it.

Then there is totty cookery, best exemplified by Nigella. Let’s hope there is less of the simpering coquettishness of her previous shows in the forthcoming Nigellissima, and more of the intelligent commentary and evocative descriptions that made her How to Eat one of the best books of the 1990s. I prefer it when Nigella shows us what she has between the ears, not down her cleavage.

As for the glamorous, waif-like Sophie Dahl (I definitely preferred her curvy, and that’s not just sour grapes), she was a curious choice for a TV chef. She inhabited the (exquisitely stylised) kitchen of The Delicious Miss Dahl with all the confidence of a South Kensington lady who has given the domestic staff the day off. Her idea of finely chopping chives was not to slice the herb into minute little green napkin rings, but to hack off inch-long pieces. Her clumsy style of cooking is nothing if not achievable, I suppose. Having attracted just 1.4 million viewers in its final episode, the six-part BBC Two show never returned.

Meanwhile, Channel 4 have been clever with their new offering, Simply Italian. With her soft Welsh vowels and glamour-model looks, presenter Michela Chiappa is the Katherine Jenkins of food. Bring on her equally nubile sisters and it’s a programme-maker’s dream. There are shots of country walks and Italian vistas, and some appealing recipes. It’s essentially a show about pasta, which, let’s face it, is what we all want to eat. But just how authentic the dishes are is open to debate. One Twitter commentator cattily remarked that Chiappa was “as Italian as a Hawaiian pizza”. The food sure looks good, though.

From the low-brow to the not-very-dizzying heights of middle-brow, there’s something for almost anyone in today’s cookery shows – that is, anyone who doesn’t consider themselves an actual food fanatic. To me, the majority are stuck in a grim limbo between unachievable food porn and undeniable presenter porn.

So what does a foodie do if they fancy something hefty for their evening’s television menu? I have one tip: if you are after the home-made boeuf bourguignon of cookery TV, rather than a quick, cheap takeaway, forget the models. It’s the older guys who really deliver.

Take BBC Two’s Exploring China, in which Ken Hom and Taiwanese Ching He-Huang romp around the country sampling its dishes. It offers plenty of good information, as well as a real sense of how the people of the world’s most populous nation eat – and Ken Hom’s quiet style is refreshing.

Likewise, Raymond Blanc’s shows – especially his BBC Two series Kitchen Secrets – have gravitas and proper advice on how to master the perfect crème brûlée or what to expect from a genuine bouillabaisse. And the best bits? The great man being told off by his tiny, redoubtable mother. Sharp-eyed Maman Blanc clearly carries a lifetime of culinary knowledge in her apron pocket.

I say we need a bit more of that in our food television. Less of the wet-behind-the-ears glamour-pusses and the chefs who may be great at the restaurant stove but eat Chinese take-aways at home. Instead of irritating voice-overs with potted backgrounds and token snippets of information, can’t we have a real food historian like Cumbrian legend Ivan Day (the leading expert of historic cookery in Britain)? When the National Trust or English Heritage wants to get a stately kitchen in working order, he’s the man they come to. I want to learn from him, too.

Fans of TV history programmes have beaten away the dolly birds and celebs – so why can’t we foodies? We want a Mary Beard of the stove – and we want one now.